Victims of the Herald

Halifax Herald staff reductions result in 24 jobs lost, 24 lives disrupted. But their pain is only the beginning of the pain for the community.

If not for the lousy weather, Jennifer Stewart would have
been in a downtown courtroom this afternoon, covering the opening
arguments in a high-profile murder trial. But thanks to the slushy,
slippery conditions outside, the judge sent the jury home at noon. So
Stewart had returned to the ChronicleHerald newsroom to
write a nothing-much-happened update, as well as a second story. The
Nova Scotia Court of Appeal had released its decision in a case
involving whether a 48-year-old man---convicted of a string of violent
offences, most recently, a vicious assault on another inmate---should
be labelled a dangerous offender. The decision had actually come down
the week before but had languished in Stewart's to-do pile until the
overworked Supreme Court reporter could find time for it.

Welcome to the New Herald Order. After the Daily News
closed in February 2008, management had clamped a lid on staff
overtime. At the end of their shifts, dayside reporters sometimes had
to turn over cursory, in-progress notes to night reporters, who then
had to cobble together some sort of article out of the bits and pieces.
More than once, Stewart had spent a day listening to closing arguments
in a trial only to be forced to hand off her story to another reporter
"coming in cold" at the end of the day because the judge was announcing
the decision at 4:30 and the paper "didn't want to pay me an hour's
overtime."

If the news wasn't urgent---and with no daily newspaper competition,
how many stories really couldn't wait?---Stewart might hang on to her
notes and write the story when she had time. Which was the case
today.

She was just beginning work on the story---"Alexander Dean McLean
has been declared a long-term offender and will be..."---when she
noticed Kristen Lipscombe, the paper's education reporter, approaching
from the direction of the office of Dan Leger, the director of news
content. Lipscombe was in tears. Rick Conrad and Greg Guy, two of the
newsroom's union reps, followed behind, ashen-faced.

It was February 3, 2009, shortly after 3:30pm. Less than an hour
earlier, Frank De Palma---"the assistant director of newsroom" in
clunky Herald management-speak---had summoned Conrad to a 3:15
meeting to discuss "a union matter." Conrad assumed it was to meet with
the paper's new special projects editor, Andrew Waugh, whose
appointment had been announced earlier that day. The union had argued
the position was unnecessary in difficult financial times, and Conrad
thought the meeting might be designed to smooth the waters.

But as he and Guy approached the meeting room near Leger's office,
Conrad noticed Theresa Williams, the Herald's director of human
resources, waiting with De Palma. She carried a box filled with
envelopes.

Oh shit, he thought, this is it! The layoffs...

When Stewart saw Kristen Lipscombe returning to the newsroom a few
minutes later, she knew what it meant too.

And, worse, what it would mean for her personally.

Three weeks earlier, on January 14, 2009, Herald
management had summoned the newsroom's full union executive to another
meeting to formally lay out what everyone knew. The newspaper business
was in free-fall, and the Herald's fortunes were plunging.

There were so many problems it was hard to know where to begin.

Over the course of the past 15 years---while the internet was
changing everything about everything---the newspaper industry had
failed to figure out a financially sustainable digital-age business
model. Many, including the Herald, had flirted with charging for
their web content but quickly gave up, and began giving away for free
online what other readers paid to read on paper. The result: More and
more paying readers were cancelling subscriptions, preferring to get
their news faster and for "free" online.

Meanwhile, the industry's traditional cash cow---classified
advertising for everything from jobs to jewellery---migrated to the
more user-friendly online world, where the ads were not only searchable
but also free.

As if that wasn't bad enough, last year's global economic meltdown
melted down the newspaper industry's most important revenue foundation:
display advertising. Advertising traditionally generates 80 percent of
a newspaper's revenues.

Analysts began to question whether the newspaper---as a
species---could survive. In the United States, big city dailies,
including the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and
even the iconic New York Times, began to seem like so many
past-their-prime dinosaurs. In Canada, CanWest, the country's largest
daily newspaper publisher, is now so deep in its own debt the future of
the daily newspapers it owns in many major cities is in doubt. There
have already been layoffs at Canada's biggest dailies.

How could the Herald, one of the few remaining independent,
family-owned newspapers, be immune to the forces ravaging an entire
industry?

That was the message Sarah Dennis, the paper's vice president and
daughter of owner-publisher Graham Dennis, delivered to the union
executive January 14.

In December alone, management claimed, the company had brought in
$700,000 less in revenues than projected. And it had lost real money in
2007 and 2008. The paper had no choice but to shed $1.5 million in
newsroom costs. Immediately. One option was to eliminate 25
positions---or about one quarter of the current newsroom staff. Dennis
insisted "layoffs are the last thing we want," which was why she had
wanted to "consult" with the union about how to achieve the necessary
savings with the least possible pain. The union had a week to come up
with suggestions.

The union's executive had a few immediate ideas, including: Don't
fill Jim Meek's special projects editor job. Meek, a veteran
journalist, recently quit to join Bristol Communications. Given earlier
belt-tightening, the paper wasn't doing many special projects, so not
filling his position might save a couple of junior reporter jobs.
Management rejected that recommendation outright. Just as it
"pooh-poohed" the idea of reducing the freelance budget to retain more
full-time staff.

The union also had a request of its own. Before suggesting ways to
cut $1.5 million from the newsroom budget, it wanted to see the
company's books in order to satisfy itself the financial situation was
really as grim as management claimed.

The Herald's owners had certainly sent mixed signals about
their financial health. During the past year---while restricting reporters' travel and overtime, offering early retirement packages to
senior staff, shutting down the Mayflower TV guide, reducing the
physical size of the paper and increasing its subscription
price---management also spent what the union suggested was $7 million
moving from a downtown office building it had owned until 2002 and occupied for
more than 90 years into new and lavish leased digs overlooking the
Northwest Arm.

The company refuses to say how much the move cost. And it wasted no
time rejecting the union's request to see audited financial statements.
"This is a privately held company," Leger told allnovascotia.com. "We're not going to
broadcast our financials to allnovascotia, or CTV or Frank."

Already sour relations between the managers and the managed curdled
in the aftermath of the January 14 meeting. Somehow, word of the
union-management session leaked to other media. Leger---a former
executive producer of CBC TV's local supper hour news show---openly
accused business reporter Judy Myrden, whose husband, Paul Withers, is
a prominent CBC news reporter, of being the source.1 After the leak and
the union's request the company open its books, Sarah Dennis stopped
even meeting with union leaders.

And then things got ugly.

Dan Leger isn't keen.

"Can't we do this by phone?" he asks, then answers his own question.
He acknowledges it's a "magazine thing---staring down the crusty editor
and all," but adds: "the thing is, I've done six or seven of these
[interviews] now and I've gotten burned on almost everyone of
them."

He's too busy to meet me today. Or tomorrow. This week, in fact, is
"crazy."

We agree I'll call back next week.

To understand why many Herald journalists are
skeptical about the financial health of their employer, you have to
understand the often fractious history of relations between management
and its newsroom.

For much of the Herald's 134 years, the Dennis family---which
has owned the paper in all its various incarnations from the Halifax
Morning Herald's January 14, 1875 first edition---has had a
reputation as a benevolent, if paternalistic, employer.

As recently as 2006, the Financial Post numbered the
Herald among Canada's 100 best companies to work for. The
paper's owners, the Post noted, had even "recently provided a
cash subsidy---$200 for every employee---to offset high home heating
and gasoline prices."

But the flip side of that benevolence has always been a
father-knows-best paternalism, coupled with a sense among many
reporters and editors that the owners play favourites, protecting
middle-management featherbedders while journalists do the heavy
lifting.

In 1977, that discontent led to the first attempt to unionize the
newsroom. The company fired 10 reporters and editors because of what it
initially described as "financial difficulties." Nine of the 10 had
signed union cards. After the union retaliated with unfair labour
practices charges, the Herald unilaterally reinstated them all
just days before the scheduled hearing, but then assigned them all
menial duties. Most quit. The Herald's remaining---and very
rattled---newsroom employees decisively rejected joining the union a
few months later.

It wasn't until 1999 that The Newspaper Guild finally succeeded in
unionizing the newsroom. It then took months of legal wrangling over
who should be included---and excluded---from union membership and
another six months of exhausting, difficult negotiations to finally
conclude a first contract. In 2004, it took strike threats and the help
of a federal mediator to nail down the terms of a second four-year
contract. The key issue then was the company's pension plan, which the
union claimed was "so horrible that a 47-year employee retired a few
years ago with a $13,000-a-year pension." The company did propose
sweeteners to the plan, but the union argued they would primarily
benefit managers while leaving union members "out in the cold." The
union eventually won.

Last year, after the paper and its newsroom union reasonably and
amicably concluded another four-year contract, which included further
improvements to the pension plan, union negotiators began to hope
management had finally accepted their existence.

But then, days after the two sides signed the new contract,
Transcontinental shut down the Daily News, effectively ending a
20-year competition for local readers and advertisers.

That dramatically changed the newsroom dynamics.

Within days, management sent out a memo, outlining draconian
newsroom travel and overtime restrictions as part of "widespread,
ongoing efforts to find ways to trim costs."

And now this.

If the paper was really in such trouble, the journalists wondered,
why was there no talk of management layoffs? There were 16 non-union
newsroom "managers," none of them in the cost-saving crosshairs. In
fact, the paper still planned to replace Meek. Why hire even more
managers if they're going to have 25 percent fewer employees to
manage?

On January 23, just over a week after the initial meeting with
Dennis, Terry O'Neil, director of news administration, emailed the
union executive to break off discussions. "It is unfortunate that the
union did not have any recommendations to put forward," he wrote. "We
will be in touch in the near future regarding next steps."

The union executive quickly replied management must have
misunderstood. Even though the company hadn't opened its books, the
union was prepared to sit down at any time to discuss how to deal with
the situation.

Ominously, management didn't respond. That is, until Frank De Palma
informed Rick Conrad he wanted to meet to discuss a "union matter."

"In a decision released last month, the Appeal Court..."
Stewart stared, uncomprehending, at the words she'd just written.

No one from management had even come into the newsroom to explain
what was happening. It had been left to the union reps to break the bad
news to their fellow journalists.

"Um, could everyone gather round?" Conrad spoke into a suddenly
silent newsroom as everyone watched Lipscombe make her way back to her
desk. "The company today..."

Conrad was too upset to continue. Greg Guy took over. He told the
reporters and editors what De Palma had told him: Today, the
Herald was giving redundancy notices to 24 newsroom employees,
the first step in a 45-day process of eliminating their
positions---and, most likely, them.

Twenty four! Stewart knew she had been the tenth last person hired
in the newsroom, which meant...2 She tried to force herself to write
her story, but she couldn't help but be distracted as friends and
colleagues made their "perp" walks with De Palma. Daniel
Bonner!...Bonner had started the same day Stewart had. Kristen
Lipscombe the year after...

Stewart knew it was only a matter of time before De Palma came for
her.

Ironically, De Palma had hired her six years before.

Stewart, a Dartmouth girl who always knew she wanted to write but
was unsure whether to become an English teacher or a journalist, had
opted to take the four-year journalism program at King's College partly
because it meant she could stay at home. She is, she jokes, "a hometown
girl."

The Herald was her dream job. On her first day at the paper,
she recalls, newsroom veteran Joel Jacobson offered her his usual
newbie's greeting. "He comes up to you and takes your hand in his, then
kisses his own..." She smiles. "I was made to feel very welcome in the
newsroom."

Stewart became full-time in 2004, in part because management forgot
to let her go when her initial one-year contract expired, so the union
invoked a clause in the contract requiring anyone employed continuously
for more than a year be considered permanent. But that was only part of
the reason. Stewart was a damn fine young reporter, and everyone knew
it.

In November 2006 when the courts beat opened up, she jumped at the
promotion. "I really like covering courts," she says now. "The courts
are the last stop at the end of the road for many people, and I wanted
to be there to tell the end of the story."

"Jennifer?" It was De Palma. "I know this stinks," he said
quietly as they walked together to the meeting room.

Inside, Stewart half-listened to the spiel---"above and beyond,"
"great work," "wish it could be different," "financial
situation..."---and wondered if this was what they said to everyone.
She looked at De Palma. He was staring at his feet. Teresa Williams,
the human resources manager who'd once told Stewart she pictured her as
a lifelong employee at the Herald, handed her the letter. There
were tears in her eyes.

And then it was over.

For once grateful for the Herald's restrictions on overtime,
Stewart handed off her unfinished dangerous-offender story to a night
reporter and left.

"The atmosphere," Leger tells me on the phone, "has become
such that it would be just adding fuel to the fire to talk publicly."
It's been a week since I first called for an interview, and he's no
more keen today. "I've been asked---and I agree---to put the kibosh on
any further public statements until there is a clearer picture about
the state of the paper going forward," he explained.

What about after the buyouts and bumping finish?

Sure, he says without much enthusiasm. Call me then.

This is more than just a story about a talented young
reporter losing a job she loves. Or even about her colleagues who are
being bought out, squeezed out, retired out or bumped out.3

This is also a story about what could be the beginning of the end of
daily newspaper journalism in Halifax.

While the union is probably right, Management is unfairly---and
unwisely---targeting its members, that doesn't change the larger
reality. The Halifax Herald, like all daily newspapers, is in
serious, life-threatening trouble.

Leger is wrong. The day the layoffs were announced he claimed in an
interview with CBC TV's Elizabeth Chiu4 that readers wouldn't notice
any difference in the newspaper, declaring the lost reporters mere
"bells and whistles."5 Staff retaliated a few days later by bringing
bells and whistles to the newsroom and making noises with them whenever
Leger or another newsroom manager was within earshot. The reality is
that those reporters and editors are not bells and whistles;
eviscerating one quarter of your frontline staff will inevitably affect
how much---and how well---you report the news. At a certain point, you
can only do less with less. Ironically, cutting the news makes the
paper less relevant---and less likely to attract the readers it needs
to survive.

But Leger is right about something else. "When the news is free," he
wrote in a column five days after the first union-management meeting,
"there will be no news. Reporters aren't volunteers. Someone has to pay
them or they can't carry on."

If nothing changes, it is conceivable the Herald---at least
as a print-on-paper newspaper, and possibly altogether---could
disappear.

Don't believe me? Last month, Denver's Rocky Mountain News,
which began publication 16 years before the Herald's first edition,
became extinct.

Why not the Herald? And why does the Herald's survival
even matter if---as many blog posters were quick to note---people can
now choose to get their news free online instead.

"Paying for a newspaper in 2009 is like being served leftovers in a
restaurant," someone who called himself jamesgreene wrote dismissively
on the CBC's website. "Everything you want to read, watch, or listen to
is just a click away...traditional media," he declared with
ill-concealed glee, "you aren't extinct yet, but if you look up in the
sky, that bright object is www.asteroid.com and it's headed for
you."

The problem is that that asteroid could easily take out the "news"
along with the newspaper. And while it might take readers a while to
notice its global absence---if the New York Times disappears,
you can still find international news on the website of the Washington
Post, or the Guardian, or Haaretz, or Al
Jazeera (at least until they too go the way of the
Times)---the consequences locally would be immediate and
disastrous.

Consider March 10, 2009, a not untypical day. That morning's Halifax
Herald contained 28 locally-generated news stories, along with
17 more local items from business, sports and entertainment
sections---and that's not counting editorials, columns, obituaries and
the rest.6 By comparison, CBC Radio's prime-time newscast at 7:30 that
morning contained just seven local news items. CBC-TV's supper-hour
news---which covers the same provincial turf as the
Herald---included 10 local stories in its 60-minute package.

There isn't a news organization in Halifax---including The
Coast---that doesn't depend to some degree on the Herald's
superior news-gathering resources---for news, story ideas, background,
occasionally for outright scalping.

No other news organization staffs the courts full-time or attends
school board meetings regularly. The other media---and those of us who
consume it---depend on the Herald to cover routine news so we'll
know when something out of the routine happens.

Bloggers are no substitute for trained, paid journalists. Most don't
report; they comment on what they read elsewhere---and their work is
rarely edited or vetted before publication. Bloggers also don't have
the wherewithal to fight the broader battles over issues like access to
information: It was the Herald that took the provincial Workers
Compensation Board to court to force it to reveal the names of
companies with poor safety records, and the Herald that lifted
the lid on restaurant health inspection reports.

One of the problems in coming to terms with what the latest cuts at
the Herald really mean, however, is that we may not immediately
notice what's being lost. The irony is we won't know what we don't know
because no one will be covering it.

That makes it easier, of course, for politicians and bureaucrats who
prefer to operate without anyone looking over their shoulders. Consider
that it was reporters at the Daily News---defunct---that broke
and pursued the provincial immigration scam scandal, and the
Herald---reporting ranks routed---that told us about the
Atlantic Lottery Corporation's lavish executive expenses.

There is a reasonable Darwinian counter-argument that states
print-on-paper newspapers are long past their best-before date, that
there is no longer any logical rationale for continuing to gum up the
environment with dead trees, ink, waste paper and delivery exhaust to
deliver day-old news and information when computers can do it more
effectively and at far less cost.

The problem is no one has yet figured out how to make online
journalism pay---or at least not cost.

With the old media hurtling toward self-destruction, there are
plenty of---increasingly desperate---suggestions of new economic
models. Creating an iTunes-style micro-payments system for news
content, for example, inventing a variation of Amazon's Kindle book
reader to take news sites out of the free-for-all web world,
transforming the traditional, mass-market-something-for-everyone
printed newspaper into a tightly focused print daily aimed at an elite
audience that can---and will---pay for it. Some even argue the smartest
thing is to let the old media---and their corporate owners---collapse
of their own ineptitude, hoping something new and better will emerge
from the ashes.

Last month, in fact, The Dominion, a left-wing national media
network that publishes in print and online (dominionpaper.ca) and "seeks to provide
a counterpoint to the corporate media," staged a series of meetings
around Halifax to drum up support for its plan to "build a working
[local] alternative to mainstream media that's reader funded and member
controlled."

Even if it succeeds, however, it is likely to be more an alternative
than a prime source of news and information. Which brings us back to
the questions. Why? What if?

Dan Leger still can't talk to me. It's now a week before the
layoffs. "Sorry I can't be of more help," he emails, "but going on the
record now would probably just complicate life."

Life for others is complicated, too. Including close to two
dozen Herald journalists, most of whom have spent their entire
careers at the paper and no longer have jobs.

Some---like entertainment editor Greg Guy and veteran columnists
Peter Duffy and Joel Jacobson---reluctantly accepted buyouts rather
than see younger colleagues lose jobs. But they take decades of vital
community history out the door with them.

Others, equally reluctantly, remain, bumping juniors because they
have to pay for mortgages or kids in college, or just because they
can't conceive of a life beyond the Herald. But most no longer
feel the loyalty they once did to the place that pays their salary.

Some of the paper's brightest younger journalists---including health
reporter John Gillis and city hall reporter Amy Pugsley Fraser---opted
for buyouts rather than wait to be pushed out the door. It felt like "a
weight lifted," Gillis explained in a Facebook posting, "but I'm still
gutted to see my colleagues treated the way they are."

Colleagues like Chris Lambie, who won a National Newspaper Award for
the Daily News in 2002 and was a finalist for the Herald
in 2008, and Kristen Lipscombe, a finalist for the Atlantic New
Journalist Award in 2005, and, of course, Jennifer Stewart.

When word leaked that Stewart was among those to be cut, several
crown attorneys signed an open letter, describing Stewart as someone
who is "highly admired by all lawyers in the Halifax region for the
accuracy of her reporting, her diligence and her balanced reporting,"
adding there is something "fundamentally wrong with aborting the
careers of the dedicated young stars in the newsroom. They are the
future of the Herald..."